


Brave the Weather

by chucks_prophet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coda, Grieving Dean, Heavy Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Episode: s12e23 All Along the Watchtower, cas is a sweetheart, s12e23 coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 07:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11595807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chucks_prophet/pseuds/chucks_prophet
Summary: Gray skies are often depicted as bad omens, but they also bring rain.Rain can mean new life, new beginnings. A fresh slate.A change.Maybe that's why people are so afraid of them. People like Dean, who loses the love of their life to a really bad storm. People like him who knows there’s no new life, just the one that was ripped away from him moments earlier. And as far as new beginnings go, his died with Cas.





	Brave the Weather

**Author's Note:**

> So this was prompted to both shake me of my writer's block, and also by the new spoilers coming to light after SDCC - one in specific, which is Misha saying during an interview that we'll get to see "most" of Cas back.
> 
> Also, get ready for my 200th fic on ao3, ya'll. It's gonna be crazy in the best way possible. <3
> 
> Title inspired by Lifehouse's "Hurricane", one of my favorite songs from a band that remains one of my old but timeless favorites to this day.

 

Gray skies are often depicted as bad omens, but they also bring rain.

Rain can mean new life, new beginnings. A fresh slate.

A change.

Maybe that's why people are so afraid of them. People like Dean, who loses the love of their life to a really bad storm. People like him who knows there’s no new life, just the one that was ripped away from him moments earlier. And as far as new beginnings go, his died with Cas.

The thunder rolls above him. The clouds are starting to pack together like wet marshmallows. Dean knows he can't leave Cas here much longer, or his body will serve as the meat for a humble earth pie, but he can't will himself to move. If he touches Cas, if he scoops up his limp body in his arms, feels how cold he's becoming, that'll confirm that he's really gone. That no God or Leviathan, or angel cares enough this time around to resurrect him.

Of course, as with more subjects than he cares to admit to, Dean is wrong.

The same man swivels his head only when he hears a familiar set of feet wallow towards him on the dirt. In many ways, this place, this home away from home, reminds him of Purgatory. Everything's quiet, eerily so, amplifying everything. Imagine having a jackhammer against your ear every time you start your car.

It also makes reminds him of doing everything he could to protect Cas, and failing miserably.

"Sam?" Dean says, feeling his anxiety drilling a deeper hole into his chest, "Are you okay? Why aren't you—?"

"I’m fine. He's gone. I don't..." Sam looks between Cas and his brother, eyes wide and brimming with unshaken tears. "I don't know. I was there with him, with Jack, and all the sudden he-he was gone!”

“Everyone seems to be doing that lately,” Dean says, turning back to Cas. He can’t see Sam, but he can feel his eyes on him heavier than the humidity in the air. Thunder rolls across the sky again, like a microphone testing sound quality, 1… 2… 3. He tenses with every shot, from his legs to his torso and into his arms, his hands balling into weak fists. “Sam, please.”

“Dean, I—”

“Sam,” he repeats, grinding his teeth. “Just don’t.”

The thunder rolls louder this time, but it doesn’t stir Dean from where he is. The earth could be cracking in half like a stale wafer and Dean would let it. Maybe that’s what he deserves.

“Dean, do you hear that?”

He does. He feels it, too. The ground actually is starting to pulsate. “No,” he breathes. The rumbling intensifies, so powerful it shakes the deadweight of Cas’s body, then he’s yelling, “No, no, no, no!”

Cas’s wings, or at least the imprint of them, glow bright yellow at the tips. Dean’s mouth parts. He looks to Sam, who has the same expression painted on his face, the one that would put Edvard Munch to shame. Dean looks to Cas again. “C’mon, you stupid son of a bitch,” he curses, holding back a sob that threatens to get out what he’s been trying to say for eight years, “you owe me this. I… I love you.”

The color in Cas’s wings flickers out like a porchlight not long after the confession. The ground ceases shaking. Dean hangs his head, breathing out a sigh his rampant heart’s been holding captive.

Then, a new noise fills his ears. If Dean hadn’t crawled out of a grave in Pontiac, Illinois, and into an abandoned gas station, he wouldn’t know what it is. He struggles keeping his eyes open from the Enochian to see the glow return, spreading like a firecracker through Cas’s wings, weaving through each feather, each vein, before making its way to Cas. Once there, it spreads through Cas’s body, from his torso out, illuminating and consuming him completely in light.

Dean’s heart skips a beat when Cas’s eyes shoot open, because they’re not the warm blue he’s used to being lost at sea in.

They’re yellow. Like the Nephilim’s, that night he took control over Cas’s body.

The Enochian dies down to a faint hum as Cas pulls himself forward with scary ease.

“C-Cas?”

Cas looks straight at him for a moment with those eyes. The yellow starts to evaporate, revealing his blues again, and so does the blank expression on his face. “Dean?” he says. The color returns to his face relatively fast due to the jumpstart in his clear anxiety as he whips his head to look around him. “Where—where are we?!”

**

“What do you remember?”

They’re sitting inside the quaint living room of Kelly’s family dream home while Sam’s scoping out the place, just to be safe—or sorry, if they do find Jack. Cas has a blanket wrapped around him that Dean found in the car. Not that it started raining, or that it’s cold, or, well, that there’s any _palpable_ reason why he would need one. Dean just feels compelled to do something, anything, for him.

Cas shakes his head, looking to Dean with his brows furrowed in a way that, for once, brings Dean comfort. “I… I don’t know,” he says, lips forming the shape of a crescendo and wavering a little in pitch as he starts to repeat, “I don’t…”

“Okay, it’s alright, um…” Dean wets his lips. Dean has his hand resting above Cas’s knee. Keyword above, not on. He’s not ready to touch him just yet. That would be too real. “I guess there’s no easy way to break this: You died. Lucifer, he came back from the Rift. He, um… he impaled you.”

Dean’s voice breaks where his thoughts don’t. He still has a hard time differentiating what’s real and what he’s imagining. One minute, Cas is dead. The next, he’s sitting next to him, staring up at him with those ridiculously blue eyes, asking _Dean_ what just happened.

“Oh,” Cas says, seeming to ease a little himself.

Being reminded of his own death eases him.

Their lives are so fucked up.

“And we’re guessing Jack, Lucifer’s love child, had something to do with bringing you back,” Dean adds, “but for the first time in a while, we have no real leads to go on. I’m just glad you’re alive— _we’re_ glad you’re alive,” he corrects.

Cas smiles a little. “Thank you. I am too… I guess. I mean, I don’t really remember much. I do remember Jack when he was inside Kelly, but Lucifer and a… what do you call it… a Rift?” Dean must look more worried than Cas at this point, because Cas, ever the angel, martyrs his worry for Dean’s, saying, “But I’m sure all the pieces will fit together eventually.”

 “So, you don’t remember hearing anything… from me?”

Cas shakes his head again. Slowly. Apprehensively.

“Oh… okay.”

“Why? Was it something of import?” Cas asks.

Dean laughs a little, but it comes out dryer than the dirt he was rooted to moments earlier, “No,” he says, removing his hand from over Cas’s knee to pinch his nose instead, “no, I, um… it’s nothing.”

“Dean, I may have just been brought back to life, but I wasn’t born yesterday,” Cas sasses, “I know you. I know when something isn’t nothing.”

Dean bites his lip, preparing. “Okay,” he says, and God, he wishes he had a beer right about now, “um… when you were, you know… dead… I told you…” Dean looks away from Cas for a moment to gain more courage. When he turns back, he notes how Cas just sitting there patiently, like the night Dean was abducted by Zachariah. He told Cas not to change, but what he really wanted to say was, “I love you.”

Dean isn’t sure what he’s expecting, but it’s certainly not the smile crossing Cas’s face.

“What?”

“I, uh… I said the same to you,” Cas says.

Dean tilts his head. Just because his heart isn’t racing like he thought it would finally getting it out in the open doesn’t mean he’s not racing to catch up, “What? You… when?”

“When I raised you,” Cas replies. “The minute I laid my eyes on you, I… well, Naomi was right, I was lost. I felt your soul and I… I don’t know. Or, at least at the _time_ I didn’t know it was love.”

Dean scoffs in disbelief. All these years he’s been harboring a secret that wasn’t ever a secret at all. “Cas,” he says, turning back to him tentatively, “can I… kiss you?”

“Dean Winchester, I’ve been waiting eight years, ten months, and 11 days for you to ask me that. Please, let’s not waste another—”

Dean doesn’t let Cas finish until he tastes and breathes in his aftershave, feels him with his hands balled into the lapel of Cas’s trenchcoat and the dirt still sticking between the folds and Cas’s long, slender hands moving to either side of his face, the warmth that translates to sweet little prickles, like Cas earlier, flowing through his veins and lighting him up from the inside out, and maybe…

Maybe, this place, this home away from home, isn’t like Purgatory in the way he thought. Maybe it’s not Cas’s being that’s, as Benny had said, making him glow like a beacon. Maybe it’s Dean’s. Maybe Dean’s love for Cas has made him a beacon for monsters all along.

But they can deal with that later. Whatever rain comes, whenever it comes, they’ll face it. Together.

 

                                                         


End file.
